Thursday, Aug 17, 2017, 10:36 am · By Michelle Chen

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte inspecs honour guards during the 116th anniversary of the PNP at its headquarters in Manila on August 9, 2017. (NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images)

The people of Manila have always struggled to survive day to day, but now they're cheating death every night. The vices and bandits that usually roam the streets are being eclipsed by a crueler menace: the foot soldiers of President Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian regime.

This week, Duterte brought another summer nightmare to the region, with 32 “drug personalities” slaughtered in 67 police operations, deployed in a series of raids on the provincial outskirts of the city. The massacre capped a year of thousands of killings in a hyper-militarized drug war, which seems to be growing bolder following Duterte’s recent expansion of military rule.

Tuesday, Aug 15, 2017, 7:16 pm · By Russell Rickford

An International Workers of the World (IWW) demonstration in New York City against fascism in Germany (date unknown). George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

The tragic death of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal who was killed when a motorist plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters who had gathered to oppose a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., may, in its own way, help prefigure the rebuilding of a more genuinely transformative Left in the United States.

Don’t get me wrong; there is little to celebrate in the bloody onslaught in Charlottesville. Still, the passing of Heyer, who was reportedly a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), reminds us that a segment of egalitarian-minded, white anticapitalists remain among the ardent foes of racism in American life. Amid the “race versus class” debates currently dividing progressives, it is refreshing to note that some young leftists still believe that the transition to a more humane economy requires a frontal assault on white supremacy.

Tuesday, Aug 15, 2017, 1:46 pm · By Max Zahn

Flavia Cabral doesn’t equivocate. She joined the fast food worker movement, she said, for a single reason: to put her daughter through college.

Cabral, 53, of the Bronx, earned $7.25 per hour at McDonald’s when she stood alongside coworkers in her first single-day strike four years ago. Over 10 strikes later, she makes $12 per hour, thanks to a statewide minimum wage hike that will gradually elevate her pay to $15 by the end of 2018.

Still, her goal remains out of reach.

“I don’t have enough savings for my daughter to finish college,” she said. “I want her to graduate.”

Cabral’s predicament is emblematic of one facing the Fight for $15: how to move beyond its titular demand to address other barriers that are keeping fast food workers from a middle class life. These obstacles include insufficient hours, non-union workplaces and crippling expenses like housing, health insurance and college education.

Fight for $15 won an important victory on one of these fronts in late-May when the New York City Council passed a bundle of laws that guarantee predictable schedules and require restaurants to offer additional hours to current workers before hiring new employees. Similar laws have been passed in cities like Seattle and San Francisco.

A less heralded law within the package of New York City reforms, however, may hold the future of the fast food movement — and, if successful, will offer an inroad to unionizing the 42 percent of American workers who make less than $15 per hour.

The ordinance allows fast food workers to join a new type of labor organization, which will advocate for workers throughout the industry and sustain itself through dues deducted voluntarily from workers’ paychecks.

It is, some say, the kernel of what could become a sector-wide fast food union—the movement’s holy grail.

In order to begin deducting dues from workers’ paychecks, the new organization, Fast Food Justice, needs to sign up at least 500 workers and it aims to do so by the time the law goes into effect at the end of November. Labor leaders in other cities and low-wage sectors are watching closely to find out if the model is worth replicating.

“There is a lot riding on this experiment,” said Janice Fine, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “It’s incredibly important but we don’t know if it will work.”

In one of the nation’s most economically disparate enclaves, the tide of organized labor is rising. Last month, more than 500 Facebook cafeteria workers in Silicon Valley voted to unionize in a move for higher wages, fair hours and secure benefits. Days later, Tesla factory workers demonstrated similar intentions, sending a list of demands to the electric automaker’s board—a product of recent talks with one of labor’s most storied forces, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW).

Unionization is a momentous feat for any labor sector, and in Silicon Valley it’s downright Herculean. California’s hotbed of technological production is notorious for its antipathy to labor rights—a stance that dates back decades. Couched in an ethos of “utopian” futurism, many of the tech industry’s postwar progenitors positioned their enterprises as avant-garde rejections of the union-oriented labor models of the East Coast and Midwest. They claimed their vision of a post-union future, free of the costs and constraints of formal labor-rights structures, would afford them the ability to innovate at breakneck speed. In the early 1960s, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce famously declared, “remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies. If we had the work rules that unionized companies have, we'd all go out of business.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been making more headlines than usual lately. Shortly after the business magnate claimed he had received governmental approval to build a hyperloop from New York to Washington, D.C., he got into a public argument with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the future of artificial intelligence. Musk also recently made comments regarding the production of Tesla’s new Model 3, a battery-electric sedan. “We're going to go through at least six months of manufacturing hell,” he told journalists.

It’s hard to know exactly what constitutes “manufacturing hell,” but it might also be difficult to ever find out. That’s because, since last November, Tesla has required employees to sign confidentiality agreements which prevent them from discussing workplace conditions. This policy has faced increased criticism since February, as workers at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif. plant have expressed concern over wages, safety and their right to unionize. They have reached out to the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) union, which is now intervening.

Thursday, Aug 10, 2017, 8:42 am · By Gabriel Kristal

Ever since the earth-shaking election of Donald Trump, there have been innumerable articles arguing that Democrats brought this upon themselves by losing white, working-class voters in the Midwest. These articles have been met with a torrent of essays urging Democrats to focus on becoming the party of diversity. And, coming back from the dead like a bloated zombie corpse is Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s New York Times piece calling for a return to Clintonian centrism.

All of these discussions imply that progressives can either fight for voters from the working class or communities of color—but not both at once. This line of thinking demonstrates a profound lack of faith in democracy and the electorate’s ability to smell bullshit.

Most victims of wage theft in Illinois never see a dime because the system meant to help them isn’t working.

That’s not what labor advocates envisioned in 2010, when the state passed a bill meant to give employees a better chance of recouping stolen wages and to toughen penalties against the employers who stiff them.

The situation, however, has gone from bad to worse for the thousands of mostly low-wage workers who have filed roughly $50 million in wage claims with the state since the measure took full effect in 2014.

Workers who report wage theft now face longer wait times, higher dismissal rates and more red tape, according to a Chicago Reporter review of complaint records and enforcement procedures at the Illinois Department of Labor.

Once more with feeling, the old debate rises into the headlines and the talk show circuit: Should governments — state, federal or local — raise the minimum wage or not? Employers of minimum-wage workers weigh in to say "no." But that raises a PR problem: It looks bad to advocate keeping workers' wages so low. So, they make a better-looking claim: that raising minimum wages causes some employers to fire low-paid workers rather than pay them more. Their opposition to raising minimum wages then morphs into an advocacy for low-paid workers to keep their jobs.

Workers and their allies mostly take the bait. They weigh in with counterarguments. These mostly respond directly, claiming that raising minimum wages does not lead to significant job losses.

Over the decades, professional economists and statisticians (increasingly overlapping sets) have entered the debate. Their entry resolved nothing. Every few years, the debate has flared up again. The economists write articles and books that enrich their resumes. Some score research grants from foundations, business lobbies and labor groups to prepare shiny new versions of the old arguments.

Monday, Aug 7, 2017, 12:43 pm · By Joe Allen

The United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) union has staggered from one defeat to the next for many years. Three years ago, the union got a punch in the gut when it was defeated in a recognition vote at Volkswagen (VW) in Tennessee. Friday’s defeat at Nissan was nothing less than a knockout punch ending for the foreseeable future any efforts by the UAW to organize the large, predominately foreign-owned auto assembly plants in the South.

News of the defeat trickled in on Friday night through friends who were present at the vote in Canton, Miss., where Nissan’s sprawling, nearly-mile-long assembly plant is located. More than 60 percent of Nissan’s approximately 3,500 eligible workers voted over a two-day period against the union. Most of us hoped to wake up on Saturday morning to better news, but Nissan—one of the world’s top automakers—beat the UAW hands down. It wasn’t even close.

Friday, Aug 4, 2017, 5:04 pm · By Joe Allen

Teamsters at a UPS station in New York wave and cheer as supportive passing motorists honk their horns 19 August, 1997. The Teamsters union announced 18 August that it had reached a tentative deal with United Parcel Service. (DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)